Network Ten executive knows battlegrounds

Network Ten’s new chief programming officer, Beverley McGarvey, was born amid the peak of sectarian violence at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1972. With her parents living in the heart of Belfast and vigilantes patrolling the streets, personal safety was paramount.

“All I remember is my mother and father talking about putting my bassinet under a dining table, so if windows got broken you were under the table," McGarvey recalls.

When she was two, her parents moved out to the suburbs – “which was much quieter" – but a real threat of violence permeated everyday life until her late teens. Mundane tasks like entering a shop or walking through the city centre required passing ubiquitous security checkpoints. “Only when I was older did I realise you could walk in and out of shops without getting checked, and I realised that what we had was abnormal," she says.

Belfast, since the ceasefire, has returned to the normality of other cities in the UK.

Life may be a lot simpler but McGarvey faces arguably the biggest challenge in her career following her promotion to acting chief programming officer in August after the abrupt resignation of veteran David Mott.

Her permanent appointment was confirmed a week ago, meaning she has taken a pivotal role in turning around the fortunes of the beleaguered Ten.

Everything is riding on whether the 2013 program schedule that she designed and helped launch with chief executive James Warburton last Tuesday actually works. Her competitors are watching closely, partly because she already has respect within the notoriously brutal TV industry.

“She’s very professional and good at what she does," said Seven West Media’s head of TV Tim Worner.

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Ten’s situation is dire. TV revenue in the 2012 financial year fell 15 per cent year-on-year, significantly underperforming the metropolitan free-to-air TV advertising market, which fell in the mid single-digits over the same period.

In the year to date to September, Ten’s share of the metro TV ad market fell to 24.3 per cent, down from 29.3 per cent in the prior corresponding period. Ten’s prime-time audience share among the three commercial networks’ multiple channels (excluding the Olympics) has dropped to 24.7 per cent, down from 27.9 per cent last year.

Since the London Games in early August, Ten has suffered a string of flops such as The Shire, I Will Survive and Everybody Dance Now, many of which were aimed at a young demographic, and the network’s main channel is struggling to get anything to rate much beyond the 600,000s.

A key difference with much of this year’s programming is that the 2013 season will skew slightly older, to be better aligned with the median age of viewers of Ten’s main channel, 41.

It’s no coincidence, then, that McGarvey’s own age is a smidgin below that. She turns 40 in a bit over three months, which not only makes her an Aquarian – “we’re meant to be humanitarian" – but also a typical viewer.

Next year’s line-up will have more drama, with the centrepiece being an eight-part series called Batavia that will be Ten’s most expensive drama per hour ever.

Based on the Peter FitzSimons book, it follows the shipwreck of the Dutch ship off the west coast of Australia in the 1600s that resulted in murder and mayhem, and will be produced by Screentime in an international co-production with yet-to-be-named UK and US partners.

Ten is hoping for a strong start to the year with a new derivative of its cooking franchise, MasterChef: The Professionals, which features judge Matt Preston and star chef Marco Pierre White putting 18 chefs through a competition. Premiering just before the normal MasterChef series, the strategy is designed to create audience momentum for Ten before the official ratings season begins.

“I’m a shocking cook, I can’t make toast," McGarvey confesses. “In fact, when we commissioned MasterChef I was the guinea pig. If I could understand what they were saying, anyone could."

Programmers are a rare breed in television. Careers are built on long apprenticeships and success often comes down to having a gut instinct for what will work, or won’t.

“You have to understand your audience, primarily," she says. “And you also have to have a good mix of creative and business skills."

“It’s important to deliver quality content within a reasonable budget framework."

Australians, she thinks, are distinctive for being “very particular about what they like". “When they like something they love it. And they love it for an amount of time and then move on to the next thing."

Given that Australia has a mid-size TV market, it can sustain the purchase of the best of US and UK shows, making Australians “quite fussy", she says. “If you give them something they don’t like, they will just not watch it."

It was a lesson Ten was reminded of throughout this year. McGarvey believes the network’s core failures were a lack of consistency and not being true to Ten’s target audience.

Understanding particular cultural differences in local markets is another requisite skill for TV programmers. Although McGarvey retains a strong Irish accent, she is well settled in Sydney, having worked with Ten for more than six years and taken permanent residency, plus a boyfriend who works in the network’s business side.

Her path to Ten’s top programming job began in her early teens when she decided she wanted to work in TV.

“Providing entertainment for people is really interesting, making something that’s quite escapist," she says.

As a child she watched a lot of TV – “which my parents did not like" – but also read books. Her favourite show was Grange Hill, set in a UK high school, and later gorged on Ten staple Neighbours, going so far as to buy Kylie Minogue’s first single, Locomotion, and queuing at a BBC store to get Jason Donovan’s autograph.

After attending a selective high school, Belfast Royal Academy, at which students were encouraged to enter the professions such as medicine and law, she instead enrolled in a BA in media studies at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, from which she graduated with honours. Her first job was as a runner at UTV in Belfast, an ITV franchise, before rising through the ranks in promotions, scheduling, development and producing for ITV in Southampton and Dublin.

She then moved to TV3, of which Canadian media company Canwest then had a controlling stake, as it did for TV3 in New Zealand and Ten in Australia.

By then she had decided programming was what she enjoyed most. “I really liked the idea of being involved in the decision-making of giving people the shows that they wanted to watch."

Canwest asked her to take up the top programming job in New Zealand in 2004.

Over the next three years she got to know Ten executives while at screenings in Los Angeles and in 2006 Ten’s then TV chief, Grant Blackley, and Mott offered her the chance to journey across the Tasman as network head of programming, reporting to Mott.

“David taught me a lot and was really generous with me over the years." She ran the day-to-day schedule, plus on-air promotions and marketing, while he focused on executive producers and strategy.

So was it a shock when he resigned after 16 years at Ten? “Not really. I think as a programmer David had been in that role for a long time and probably wanted to do other things. It’s a big challenge."

Mott was the last of the old executive team to depart. But Ten has gone through a number of senior executive changes this year as the network has battled ratings and revenue declines.

“It’s an unpleasant time when we have shows that aren’t performing. That’s quite stressful anyway, to manage that and to move the channel forward and to keep everyone’s spirits up."

Elisabeth Murdoch, while delivering a keynote address at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August – the first women to do so in 17 years – lamented that the global industry was still dominated by men.

“When I first got to Australia, it was probably more male than other markets I’ve worked in, but I think that’s probably changing," McGarvey said, citing a number of women heads of department at Ten and senior women executives at independent production companies.

Her favourite shows now, she says, include Modern Family, MasterChef (she’s trying more than toast) and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.

“He’s quite positive and altruistic," she says of Sorkin. “I like that stuff. I know it’s not true, but I think it’s a nice thing to watch."